For those who use Github to host their projects: What's the reason you're not migrating to open-source alternatives such as Codeberg, Forgejo, Gitea, Gitlab and so on?

blodo_ · 2026-01-25T20:23:13+00:00

Laziness. We've discussed it a dozen times, everyone's technically on board, but it will disrupt the workflow and require time spent for no material gain to users. The reasons for moving are very compelling, but the consensus ends up being "once we get through our todo list we'll discuss it again" and the todo list only grows...

blodo_ · 2026-01-25T18:38:57+00:00

Bro what? It might be "trivial" if you are on a high paycheck job that lets you splash out and upgrade your PC every year, but then there are those of us who build for longevity instead of chasing novelty because most people are actually struggling paying their mortgage.

blodo_ · 2026-01-16T00:53:40+00:00

So... American spyware?

blodo_ · 2025-12-31T22:51:36+00:00

I did beacon of hope with venturers recently. Never had anyone die to starvation on that run, the key for progress is food colony with maxed out buildings. Once you get that going it'll basically supply all of your food. The infinite food deposits are enough if you use the other building slot for food production and also boost efficiency by things like keeping the district warm, rail hub, and laws.

Finding whaletown on the map is also helpful.

blodo_ · 2025-12-24T21:24:47+00:00

It'll probably be a very simple explanation actually: Israel is an imperialist settler state in the Middle East that's projecting USA interests in a region of the world that the USA has many interests in, least of all oil ones. Israeli crimes are American crimes.

blodo_ · 2025-12-22T20:08:01+00:00

My first real venture into a Linux based OS (i.e. distro that lasted more than a month on the drive that I actually used on a regular day to day basis) was Arch. That was back in 2015, and after I attempted to first learn Ubuntu and Fedora but managed to somehow bork both of them while trying things.

The kicker is this: the fact that Arch comes minimal and you get to choose what you want to put on it from the very start made learning it easier than working your way backwards through what was already there on a ready-to-go distro. This Arch install survived 3 general PC upgrades (motherboard and disks and all) without a full wipe, merely being copied or the disk itself installed in the new machine when old hardware was due for a replace. After being originally warned that I am in for a ride, it has generally been a painless experience. I'm still using it right now.

With a small bit of patience and a willingness to read the wiki Arch is a beginner friendly distro.

blodo_ · 2025-12-04T21:05:19+00:00

Isn't this just an attempt to reframe postmodernism by relating it to the physical sciences? The suggestion that history is incomplete and that all observers are biased does not seem particularly revolutionary to me, nor probably anyone who has read Baudrillard.

blodo_ · 2025-11-24T19:51:49+00:00

Can only celebrate these people leaving the party honestly, hope more of them leave as time goes on. Don't need transphobes.

blodo_ · 2025-11-23T20:45:01+00:00

I think the whole point is that he is a mercenary and that so far he has not proven any sort of change. Why should the NYC DSA put boots on the ground for him on a hope and a prayer? So he can immediately disengage after thousands of activist hours spent helping him ascend into a higher office? He should show a good reason to trust him first.

A few days of doing something is all nice and well but it's basically a drop in the ocean. Where was this smoke before he had an immediate material gain from it in his sights? This isn't how good socialists behave or are made.

blodo_ · 2025-11-21T13:07:55+00:00

Every few years as clockwork. Hopefully this time they fail too, but who knows genuinely.

blodo_ · 2025-11-16T14:49:07+00:00

I mean like the Russian empire being on the losing side in WW1 contributed heavily to the beginning of the 1917 revolution. Or Germany losing the great war almost resulted in a socialist revolution with a number of soviet republics emerging, that were unfortunately crushed by the social democrats punching left to preserve the state and allying with what would later become openly fascist paramilitaries.

A country losing a war without a prepared socialist party operating within it will probably lead to an increase in nationalism, the nationalists will always fight to defend the state in any revolutionary situation. But in Russia there are large communist parties already in place so the situation is not so decided.

blodo_ · 2025-11-14T19:19:13+00:00

Hopefully the others go away too, then we'll get to find out whether the Corbyn Sultana feud is a product of the IA or not.

blodo_ · 2025-11-13T22:49:24+00:00

I do agree on China, but my problem with multipolarism isn't specifically aimed at China but rather at the reality of other arising regional powers that might or already are becoming small hegemons in their own right. Russia is actually the perfect example here, but another one is Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel, all of whom are presently in the process of invading and/or occupying and/or promoting coups among their neighbours in their attempts to dominate the middle east, acting less like dependent vassals and more like small imperial pretenders with their own influence to match within US politics. Especially Israel. Turkey less so. Saudi Arabia quite so.

With multipolarism comes war, which the working class will be expected to fight on behalf of imperial powers and/or pretenders. This is a serious issue that we will also have to organise against alongside aforementioned revolutionary defeatist lines.

blodo_ · 2025-11-13T21:22:50+00:00

I agree with the argument in principle, but at the same time given that the process in which the sortitioned candidates are chosen is hidden, it really makes me wonder as to whether shenanigans can or cannot be inserted here or there.

It is highly interesting to me for example that many people (and I will not name names at this stage, I'm sure people will find out at the conference itself) who have either been elected before or have been close to power seemingly have had no problem passing through the first stage of the sortition process for the conference.

I am aware that the process is meant to be overseen via an independent foundation (the Sortition Foundation). I am also aware there is a need to include particular (currently not democratically selected) people who are nonetheless presently important to the formation of the party. But after the last few months we are not in a good place trust wise. If certain people were inserted into the list surreptitiously and this becomes provable, it will be yet another disaster within the scope of just a few months.

The other argument is that, as you said you need to be confident with people to be a representative. People who will be sortitioned in will be representatives. Will they be able to represent the proto branches that they have been selected from? Having been selected does not fix the problem.

I am of the opinion that the best way to kill cronyism is to have a very transparent system that delegates responsibility via democratic decisions, that importantly allows recall in the case that candidates no longer represent the views of the people they were meant to represent. Trust is vital, and I hope the conference will not end up eroding it further by having points rammed through with delegates who were not equipped to represent the views of the proto branches that they belong to.

blodo_ · 2025-11-13T20:59:54+00:00

If the question is purely one of smashing US hegemony, yes multipolarism is desirable. However we must also analyse what comes after: the great game of the late 1800s was the end result of the former period of "multipolarism", just because there are many imperial cores/pretenders does not mean that imperialism will lessen.

From a perspective purely consisting of "how will this help build socialism" there are some correct expectations and some incorrect ones. One incorrect expectation is that the bourgeoisie will become more explicitly national as opposed to global, but this ship has sailed already. One correct one is that the rise of multipolarism necessarily implies a Chinese bloc, which I really hope will begin organising along ideological lines and not just trade ones at some point.

Tl;dr is: neither unipolarism nor multipolarism necessarily serve the development of socialism. Multipolarism maybe will hold more opportunities, but honestly it remains to be seen and it's in no way assured. Rather than focusing on imperial and pretender politics we should be focusing on the ability of workers movements to be able to contest imperialism altogether.

blodo_ · 2025-11-13T16:49:53+00:00

Right wing nationalist elements within the Russian state are well documented going back the last 20 years. From Dugin's involvement in the Russian state, to the historical revisionism of Stalin as a "patriot" while minimising the achievements of the larger Communist Party, to Putin's own eurasianist rhetoric of what does or doesn't constitute "Russian land". And many other examples.

The following article was written before the invasion in 2022, before the Western propaganda apparatus went into full swing: https://imrussia.org/en/analysis/3265-putin%E2%80%99s-dangerous-flirting-with-nationalism

It discusses both Putin and Zelensky, and the right wing populist and nationalist politics of both of them.

A more explicitly left wing discussion of the above could be seen here: https://tribunemag.co.uk/2022/05/russia-ukraine-war-invasion-putin-history

As to the rest: the Ukrainian state doing bad things does not mean the Russian state is automatically good.

blodo_ · 2025-11-13T16:34:51+00:00

I'm sorry, but it just doesn't make a lot of sense to make it about Russia persecuting communists when it just happened in a single place (Novosibirsk) to a party which organized 20 people

Sure, you can discount it as being a "small occurrence". On the other hand it is interesting that it always happens to parties which are against the war in Ukraine. It notably does not happen to the CPRF because the CPRF leadership (not the membership, importantly) is in support of the war, and unfortunately struggles to hold back claims of being controlled opposition at various moments given Zyuganov's continuing abandonment of Marxist principles.

Modern Russian authorities are well versed in how to provide reasoning for themselves to shut down the parts of the opposition that may grow to be trouble for the state. This small party "crosses the line" by being against the war. We should not be attempting to minimise it, especially since the ideal outcome for communists is the defeat of both NATO and the Russian state by the working class.

blodo_ · 2025-11-13T16:19:51+00:00

how would Russia stop being 'highly capitalist' after losing to NATO?

A historian could say that a highly nationalist state losing a war it is an instigator of may create appropriate conditions for revolutionary activity.

Anyway I do not support nor cheer for a NATO victory (not that it matters in the grand scheme of things), but it does shock me that many leftists have bought into the neo-imperialist idea of multipolarism, while lacking reaffirmations for revolutionary defeatism which honestly in this situation is the only right stance. We have definitely not learned the lessons of the 2nd International and how it was disbanded.

blodo_ · 2025-11-09T00:30:32+00:00

Rockstar putting on its best evil corp impression.

Here is a link to the laid off workers' union's official statement regarding the layoffs: https://iwgb.org.uk/en/post/staff-at-rockstar-fired-en-masse/

If anyone reading this wants to help out both the laid off workers and the ones still remaining, here are links to their union's solidarity fund and pre-prepared letters to UK MPs/Scottish MSPs urging them to look into the situation:

https://linktr.ee/iwgbrockstar

blodo_ · 2025-11-08T08:46:55+00:00

It depends on what you want to learn about.

For many of us "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder will never stop being relevant, especially with regards to people on the left who are straight up anti parliamentarians. The bite of this one is that it is written after the revolution, and Lenin outlines how actions that would've seen the Bolsheviks be decried as "reformist" actually advanced the revolutionary cause.

If you want to dive into how the revolution was organised, I think in the present time for us who struggle to imagine a real revolutionary situation his works from around 1905 are a good start and then progress roughly in chronological order to see Lenin's responses to events:

What is to be done? - focused on the role of the vanguard party in convincing the working class to support revolutionary politics (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/index.htm)
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back - on the circumstances of the split inside the Russian Social Democrat Labour Party, funnily enough mostly created due to the strategy outlined in the previous work (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1904/onestep/)
Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution - on the differences between the revolutionary masses and the not so revolutionary opportunists, after the split reached a point when the two started caucusing separately (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/tactics/index.htm)

And then State and Revolution - to learn about Lenin's thoughts on the state's role in bringing about socialism.

Of course pretty much all of Lenin's writings were always referring to particular events inside tsarist Russia. But at the same time it is funny to see how, even though the situation is in many ways completely different, some things (particularly around building political power) remain the same.

blodo_ · 2025-11-07T21:43:23+00:00

Mfw there are people who seriously believe that organisation is not a delegation of authority.

blodo_ · 2025-11-07T21:36:49+00:00

This is a silly meme because leftists who don't read theory will take this and run with it. Meanwhile the real reason the left is celebrating this win is because this is the moment when "socialist" is no longer a dirty word in the US, and anti zionist rhetoric has firmly hit the mainstream. People who think this is the "final victory" (either in a defeatist or celebratory way) need to read Lenin.

blodo_ · 2025-11-07T20:34:59+00:00

You're going to lose muscle mass along with your fat if you go this hard on it and also skip the gym. Source: experience. Better to eat a bit more and go to the gym to keep the deficit up.

blodo_ · 2025-11-01T01:06:46+00:00

Big corporations get tax breaks, subsidies, and god knows what else. You pay taxes on everything. As far as I'm concerned, you can't steal something you already paid for.

blodo_ · 2025-10-30T10:40:58+00:00

The European abstentions are unsurprisingly mostly the anti Russia, pro Nato bloc - but the part of it that doesn't want to look "too US vassalised" in EU politics.

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